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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Lurgio who wrote (22448)	2/4/1999 12:57:00 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Infrastructure and layoffs Jim, when I said infrastructure sales continue fast, I meant for cdmaOne in general, not Q! in particular, where sales have been indifferent - good but Lucent, Motorola and Northern Telecom seem to have the lions share by a long way, with Samsung and the Koreans doing very nicely. Q! NEC and some others are struggling to get a decent bite of the pie. Q! has decent sales, but not profitable and competitors are doing better. The good point about the rapid infrastructure development whether Q! sells it or not is that Q! gets royalties and sells handsets and ASICs and gets royalties for all the competitor handsets sold. The faster the gaps fill, the more attractive it is so the faster handsets sell and the quicker minute prices drop and the quicker technology develops and hey presto, we have the network effect coming in! The article about internet connections all heading to the USA and the economic and political power this is taking away from other countries is part of the same theme. Several years ago, my neighbour, who was Sales Manager for International Traffic was telling me how things would evolve - they would have to 'manage' prices down, hoping to avoid meltdown, worldwide traffic would increasingly go to a Los Angeles hub for redistribution and the real money would be made by the companies which could capture the customer rather than cart the calls around the world. He seems to have been right. Back on the network effect, forget about multi-mode, multi-band handsets which are a contrivance for the GSM people to hope to stay in business. Surplus chips are undesirable and expensive in a handset. Customers won't want them as coverage improves. Vodafone, NTT and others will want a simplified technology base which will be backward compatible WWeb based on cdma2000 with VW40 bells and whistles. Sure there will be some dual modes for a while, but just as more and more people learn English/American/Webese so more and more people will just go with lingua franca WWeb and forget the multilingual multimode multiband stuff which will cost more for little extra functionality. On layoffs - which was discussed by some here: Q! laid off so many because their sales were NOT growing quickly enough. Sorry to give the wrong impression on what I meant. 700 is quite a layoff, but keep in mind the rate of growth Q! has had. It would be near impossible and pure luck to get the staff numbers right for such a multifaceted enterprise with such a rapid growth rate. Most of those were temps, who know that they are temps. Sure, they might not like being laid off from the best employer, but that's just the way things work. I don't like taking a $20m charge to cover the cost of the layoffs either, but I'm not whining - it's the price of taking on a huge challenge, having huge success, but not getting things precisely right. To go from a few hundred to 11,500 employees in 6 years is very rapid growth when done without buying other companies. To complain that about 300 permanent staff were laid off, with a cost of $20m, as though this is a malevolent act, is absurd. It's genuinely surprising to see serious comments such as this: "... Instead it lays off in order to create "one-time write offs" and shift manufacturing across the border." Mqurice PS: The curse lifting seems to have freed some minds to the possibility that things are good at Q!